1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to e-discovery and virtualization techniques and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for preserving virtual desktops for e-discovery through an agent-less solution.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, large to mid-sized organizations maintain volumes of data of Electronically Stored Information (ESI), such as confidential and/or privileged data. For example, such organizations may store financial information (e.g., SEC reports), legal information (e.g., corporate compliance, intellectual property, pending litigations and/or the like), as well as internal documents (e.g., health records, employee information and/or the like). Such data may be archived and stored in the repository for later use by various archival software products (e.g., SYMANTEC Enterprise Vault). Afterwards, such data may expire and become unavailable. For example, documents (e.g., a deposition, an affidavit and/or the like) created during a previous legal matter (e.g., litigation, mediation and/or the like) are deleted and thus cannot be used in any pending legal matter. As such, the organization desires to preserve the confidential and/or privileged data relevant for future purposes.
A legal hold (e.g., litigation hold and/or the like) may be a process that preserves numerous forms of the ESI in anticipation of litigation. For example, the various archival software products may support such a legal hold in order to prevent confidential and/or privileged data in the archives from expiration for a certain number of users. However, legal holds are difficult to enforce and control for confidential and/or privileged data that resides within a custodian computer (e.g., a desktop or a laptop) that contains large volumes of the ESI. Legal holds are easier to implement in archives (and backups) since the archived data resides in a central location that is directly under control of the Information Technology (IT) department. Whereas, custodian computers contain ESI in a decentralized form that renders legal holds very difficult to implement. Conventional legal hold solutions on custodian computers require agents (i.e., software programs) to be installed to lock down the archived data in the event of a pending litigation.
Hence, due to the rapid proliferation of virtualization technologies (e.g., VMWARE Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)), implementing legal holds of virtual desktops is important for many organizations. Conventional agent-based solutions for creating legal holds on the confidential and/or privileged information within the custodian computers may be applied to the virtual desktops in a same or similar manner. Such agent-based solutions are not optimized for virtual desktops. Since the virtual desktops are actually virtual machines running in centralized servers, legal holds may be performed on the virtual desktops using more efficient, agent-less solutions as compared to physical machines. Also advanced virtual machine features (e.g., snapshots) may be utilized to perform legal holds on the virtual desktops in a non-intrusive manner.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for preserving virtual desktops for e-discovery using an agent-less solution.